THE TURKISH HAREM.

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 74, 18 June 1927, Page 25

THE TURKISH HAREM.

RETIRING FROM BUSINESS. There is new talk in old Stamboul and dismay among the much married Turks, for the Turkish National Assembly has adopted the Swiss Civil Code, and “one husband one wife” will, in future, be the rule, with five years imprisonment for bigamy. Under the old Turkish law it was sufficient for the husband to drop three stones in front of his wife arid to repeat three times: “You are no wife of mine,” and the divorce was complete. But, in future, the Turkish Pasha may drop a whole cartload of stones before his ayesba, and it will have no more effect than if he dumped them in an English drawing-room. He will merely be told to take them away and build a rockery with them. Up to now the Turk has been master in his own house. But the new law hring s him into line with all the other husbands of the world, writes a “Tame Bachelor” in an English paper. If the breakfast kipper is frizzled to a cinder and the coffee is mud, it will be of no avail that he rattles the three chunks of macadam in his pocket and turns the glassy bowstring eye on Zulekia.

He will find a new spirit in his little lump of Turkish Delight when she feels herself backed by the whole Civil Code of Switzerland, now good Turkish law.

“If you think you are going to lie abed and read the “Daily Mirror” while I moil and toil with the breakfast, you can get up and cook vour bacon yourself,” the seragio will answer, as it slaps a plate of cast-iron toast down on the table.

Zulekia w’ill not take long in fitting herself to new circumstances. She will soon put the north eye on Circassian dancing girls and late sittings at the coffee shops. She will discover that the narghile pipe with its howl of rosewater and tobacco of Shiraz makes Hamdi cough, and will cut him down to three pipes a day so that he will lurk in the men’s apartments smoking surreptitious fags and destroying the packets carefully so that she can’t count them, one of the oldest dodges of the British husband. Give a woman an inch and she takes an ell. Hitherto the turkish house has been divided into the selamik and the harem. In the selamik the master of the house receives his friends and talks of the events of the day. In the harem his wives have received their lady friends. But soon the harem will invade the selamik just as, in other countries, it has invaded the billiard-room and the smoke-room. It will turn on the gramophone and Hamdi will have to dance fox-trot and. maybe, even the Charleston. There will he no locking up the harem at sunset. Hamdi will have to rustle tickets for the movies or the latest revue. The secret garden will be laid out with a hard tennis court, and romance, intrigue and tuberculosis will go up the spout together. There will he no more talk of the p.'ice of lambskins at Sarrnacand or the supply of tobacco of Shiraz or dried apricots of Zend, when the League of Bright Young Things invades the sclamik and Hamdi has to spend his days under the two-seater, discovering in his stolid Turkish way why it won’t go.

The reckless rider must go. We all know that. But the reckless rider thinks that he must go fast.